Mikey: “Mikey’ll eat it. He’ll eat anything!” (From a 1980’s breakfast cereal commercial.) “Do we have some stuff on the books that will be tough to get rid of? Yes. Am I worried about it? No. The Fed’ll buy it. They’ll buy anything!” proclaimed Richard Fuld, Lehman Brothers C.E.O., summer 2007. “The worst is behind us,” he added in April, after the Fed came through with their implicit guarantee to buy up all the worthless crap that nobody else wanted. See Fool’s Gold.
Fool's Gold: What the dollar is backed by – the assets of the Federal Reserve, composed mostly of AAA-Rated Securities, which are about as marketable as the chocolate-covered cotton balls that Milo Minderbinder was trying to foist on people in Catch 22. “The Fed’s balance sheet is getting corrupted with junk that others won’t buy or lend against,” observes Robert Robb.
AAA-Rated Securities: The new word for what used to be known as sub-prime mortgages or, more colloquially, as worthless crap. See Fool’s Gold.
Source:
Axiomatic Economics by Victor Aguilar: The Devil’s Dictionary of Economics
From now on, whenever anyone refers to Ben Bernanke at Conflicting Views, let's write it Ben "Mikey" Bernanke.
08-02-2008, 04:27 AM
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